Leaders need to spend more time at the real touch points impacting customers and employees. Only then will they truly understand the real situation so that they can take effective actions to improve performance. And, being seen in Gemba only in crisis situations undermines its value and leaves a negative stain on it.

“Voice of the Customer” – VOC in short – is a key topic in all kind of customer service, TQM or Lean Six Sigma training and related project work. There are two main categories for VOC data, reactive and proactive. Proactive data is collected with methods like focus groups, interviews, observations, surveys or test customers, […]

The Moment of Truth is the short time frame when a customer experiences the product or service that many people have prepared often over many months. It is the moment when a small, often unintentional mishap has the huge potential to spoil the result of hard work by others in the organisation behind the scenes. […]

A team spends months on improving customer-facing branch processes of a bank. After benchmarking with sister companies across the world and after carefully mapping out process steps they come up with an improved flow that drastically reduces the processing time for branch customers. It surely looks like a nice success story. However, they get devastating […]

A typical Friday evening starts with a family dinner in a nice atmosphere. This time we decide to visit one of our favourite restaurants for a light dinner with Sushi. Upon arrival we are amazed. Usually, this place is packed on a Friday evening. Today, more than half of the seats are empty. Therefore, going […]

Everyone, undoubtedly, has had the unenviable honour of experiencing ‘bureaucratic government processes.’ Be it applying for your first ID or passport, to initially obtaining a driving license and the inevitable dealings with the tax man. I had a different experience. No Red Tape …